A place to share my thoughts, ideas, and experience in matters I deal with as part of my daily work.

Wednesday, November 24, 2010

“Application Development Teams Must Find A Better Way To Develop Apps”

In his recent blog post, “Java Is A Dead-End For Enterprise App Development”, Mike Gualtieri, a Forrester Analyst, describes the reasons for which Java, though still firmly planted in enterprise IT shops for custom-developed applications, has served its purpose, and that now it is time for Java based development teams to move forward and that “Application development teams must find a better way to develop apps”.

Java’s success can be contributed essentially to two of its basic characteristics: Cross Platform and Open Source.

Though open source proved to be successful for commercial companies selling commodities such as Linux, MySQL, and JBoss, as Peter Yared writes in his guest blog post “The Failure of Commercial Open Source Software”, it failed to provide companies any significant advantage over proprietary software. “Commercial open source companies have the same cost structure as the enterprise software companies that preceded them” says Yared, and he further explains that “many open source companies exhibit at tradeshows, have salespeople, systems engineers, customer services departments, and on top of that employ the vast majority of developers that are working on their open source project.” and he adds “ the headache of maintaining a community and integrating random code patches is just as expensive as fixing reported bugs with your own people.”

However, with all its merits, Java was and still is a 3GL coding platform, which haven’t really resolved the coding complexities that many organizations wish to avoid. “Java development is too complex for business application development” says Gultieri. And he is absolutely right. Big, complex enterprise business applications become a coding nightmare when based on Java (or any other 3GL for that matter).

Gualtieri concludes his blog post by stating that “Development platforms are not the only items to consider. Cloud computing and mobile, to name a few, are other trends that must factor into your new strategy”. Indeed! Many companies are now at a significant cross-road, where turning their applications into cloud-enabled application becomes imperative and new, apt technologies and platforms are required. Companies realize that they need much more than a development platform, they need a cloud-enabled, mobile-enabled application platform that will enable them to make this dramatic shift with minimal risk, shortest time to market and with a significant, rapid and positive ROI.

Ttrend trains are moving faster than ever

uniPaaS is exactly what companies should be looking at right now. These are critical times, where trend trains are moving faster than ever, and companies need to get their act together and move fast. Decisions need to be taken now. Decisions should not be based on past glory, or fondness of past platforms. Brave decisions should be made for the near and far future. The chosen platform should be such that covers all angles: Cloud-ready, Mobile-ready, Super Productive, Super Flexible, an Completely Open to enable companies to rapidly ascend to the clouds in the shortest time possible without throwing away past investment in legacy applications, and while preserving the option to move between on-premise to off-premise deployment at any given time.

Cloud and Mobile are very disruptive trends, luckily uniPaaS is able to sooth such disruptions and overcome them with great success. As Gualtieri sums it up “You must transform to a Lean, Mean Change Machine”.